The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
Book Review

The closest I have to having a desk in The News-Review newsroom is a wooden letter tray sitting on top a filing cabinet. I find everything from handwritten notes from readers, mail addressed to me, and occasionally a book that has arrived in anticipation of a review.

I come into the newsroom infrequently to check the box.

That was the case last Monday morning. Actually, I was in Roseburg to return books to the Douglas County Library, only to discover it would not be open until noon. It was 10:30 a.m. and too late, I felt, to return to my rural home and come back to the city later so I decided to stop by the newspaper to check my box.

It was piled high with communications, among them was the familiar padded mailing envelope containing a book, "The Girl on the Bridge" by Ken Reger. The letter accompanying the book said it was his first novel.

After years of teaching writing at the college level, I had seen many manuscripts of first novels. Oh hum, another first novel from a wannabe writer. I left the newspaper, drove a block up the street and parked in front of the library. Being a compulsive reader I opened "The Girl on the Bridge."

After reading just the first two pages I knew this was not an amateurish first novel. I read deeper and was almost to the middle of the 314-page book when the library doors were finally opened.

By that time I also knew that Reger was a master of one of the toughest writing techniques in fiction — the flashback. He was also a master at putting the reader alongside him as he spun his yarn, and before reaching the surprise ending of the book, the reader has lived inside the protagonist Kevin Edwards, a Vietnam veteran who comes to terms with his past.

The novel deals with an ugly truth, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is timely today as military combat veterans are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Quynn Elizabeth Wilson had earlier sent up that warning in her book, "Accepting the Ashes: A daughter’s look at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," written from the perspective of a daughter whose father, a two-time Vietnam veteran from Portland, suffered and died, a victim of PTSD. Her book is now being used by counselors in some veterans hospitals in treating PTSD patients.

In "The Girl on the Bridge," Kevin Edwards comes home from the war to life in a small town, but with a deep, mysterious secret about something that happened in Vietnam in the summer of 1965 that haunts him. He seeks treatment for his nightmares at a VA hospital. The meds are messing with his head and he realizes he cannot remember things he knows he should and that sends him into deep despair.

He works at menial jobs, and at a baby food factory he meets Cherokee Irons, falls in love and she helps him put together his shattered life.

The mastery of the novel is how Reger weaves the story through flashbacks. The flashbacks appear in italics, to help the reader understand when Edwards drifts back to the past.

In my opinion, each reader will find a different story within this novel. It is definitely a love story and the character of Cherokee Irons makes it so as she and Kevin Edwards begin a strange odyssey that will lead them into a labyrinth of deceit and peril that heightens the story.

The novel begins when Kevin Edwards has fully recovered from PTSD, graduated from the university with a doctorate degree and is now a highly respected administrator of a hospital. He is the pillar of the community, married to a socialite. He is jarred back to his Vietnam experiences with a phone call from Cherokee Irons and thus begin the flashbacks.

When I read Reger’s biographical sketch, I thought this is an autobiographical novel about his experience in Vietnam and dealing with PTSD as if he were writing to get the skeletons out of his own closet.

In my interview with the author, however, I discovered how wrong I was. Despite the authenticity of his description of PTSD, Reger was not in Vietnam. He was in the military as a 23-year-old during the Vietnam era, and assigned to military intelligence.

"Even though I was not there and not in combat," he said, "I returned home from the military an angry man — very angry. It took me years to get past that and I think I suffered from PTSD, but not like what I wrote in the book. I think I was angry because people didn’t even know — or care — that a war was on and young men were dying."

He completed his education, got a doctorate degree in humanities and taught at the university level until he retired and bought a cattle ranch in Missouri because "I always wanted to be a cowboy."

He had written newspaper and magazine articles and decided to tackle a book. "I was always interested in PTSD and had previously done research on the disorder, so it was natural that I worked that into my plot," he said.

His secret to writing such a convincing novel, he said, is that "I became that character, Kevin Edwards, as I wrote."

Reger has already written four chapters and completed an outline of a new book, "The Girl on the Run," in which he brings Kevin Edwards back into the story about a woman veteran who is suffering from PTSD.

The last chapter of "The Girl on the Bridge" changes the entire novel, but that bit of intrigue is what makes the book so readable.

(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He writes a weekly column that appears on the Thursday Opinion Page.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Books, Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.